Power Outage Delays Launch of NASA Solar Observatory

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A power outage in California over the weekend has delayed launch
preparations for NASA's newest sun-studying spacecraft by 24
hours, pushing the new solar observatory's blastoff to no earlier
than Thursday (June 27), space agency officials said.

The
Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph satellite, or IRIS, was
originally slated to lift off Wednesday (June 26) from
California's Vandenberg Air Force Base. But the power went out
for several hours at Vandenberg and other locations throughout
the state's central coast Sunday night (June 23), affecting the
base's key tracking and telemetry systems.

As power was restored at Vandenberg, a fire broke out in an
electrical switching box that feeds about five transformers at
the base, officials said. The fire damaged an important part that
now needs to be replaced before the tracking systems can come
back online.

"Once that piece is installed and we've tested it — and we've
brought up all the range equipment, so we've gone through all the
extensive testing and rehearsing that we need to do — we feel
confident that we'll be able to support a Thursday evening
launch," said Lt. Col. Burton Catledge, commander of the 2nd
Range Operations Squadron at Vandenberg.

IRIS will launch aboard a Pegasus XL rocket, which is built by
the Virginia-based aerospace firm Orbital Sciences. A carrier
aircraft will drop the Pegasus into the skies above Vandenberg,
at which point the rocket's engines will kick on and send the
spacecraft into Earth orbit.

Once up there, IRIS will peer at a mysterious sliver of the sun
between the solar surface and the corona, or outer atmosphere.
Scientists are keen to understand this interface region, which is
just 3,000 to 6,000 miles (4,800 to 9,600 kilometers) wide,
because the immense energy flowing through it helps drive many
aspects of
space weather.

IRIS is "going to look in closely, and it's going to look at that
specific region to see how the changes in matter and energy occur
in this region," Jim Hall, IRIS mission manager for the Launch
Services Program at KSC, said in a statement. "It's going to
collectively bring us a more complete view of
the sun."

Weather on Thursday is expected to be good; Air Force officials
estimate just a 20 percent chance of a weather-related scrub.